“There’s always some sort of a philosophical or political aspect in my movies,” Emmerich says, though he admits he can be too subtle. “In ‘Independence Day,’ everybody thought it was blatantly patriotic, and nobody saw that it was the first African-American, WASP and Jewish guy working together to save the world.”
When speaking with Roland Emmerich, a director synonymous with big-budget disaster films, the first question that comes to mind is what, exactly, does he have against the planet Earth? “Nothing,” he insists, sitting in a lodge in Jackson Hole, Wyo., just miles from where he filmed much of his latest movie, “2012,” was filmed. “Sometimes you destroy what you love.”
After raining destruction down through aliens (“Independence Day”), giant monsters (“Godzilla”) and global warming (“the Day After Tomorrow”), Emmerich admits he had reservations about taking on another project of that kind. “I thought, ‘Should I do another disaster movie? Another end of the world movie?’” Emmerich admits, but in the end he relented. “I’m drawn to disaster movies because in disaster movies there are no rules, really. As long as you tell story lines that all converge at the end.”